Linux is getting more and more users everyday. There are even more users who want to give it a try but they are afraid they might lose their data or they won't be able to remove it in case they don't like it. Here comes the virtualization technology. A virtual machine creates a virtual hard drive in which you can install another operating system (guest OS) and run it along with your main one (host OS). Therefore it is a very good solution for those who want to try Linux without having to really partition their hard disk. In this guide I will explain how to install Linux and specifically Ubuntu on Windows XP.

There are a few virtualization tools that can be used for that job such as VirtualBox, VMWare and QEMU. If you are interested on QEMU you can read my How to install Linux on Windows using QEMU guide. However for this tutorial I'll be using VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a cross platform full virtualizer for x86 hardware. It runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems such as Windows, Linux and OpenBSD.